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How an iOS Game Helps Betaworks Improve Its News Products

Betaworks has been in the news a lot lately for, well, disrupting the news. It recently purchased Instapaper and before that Digg, and it's currently working on an alternative to Google Reader. But on Wednesday, the company announced something that might seem a bit random at first: It's releasing a game.

That's right, Betaworks released its first-ever mobile game called Dots. The game, which is only available for iPhone, is as simple as it is addictive. There's a grid of different colored dots. You connect the dots that are the same color with a straight line. Each time you do, those dots disappear and are replaced by more dots. Repeat until the clock runs out after 60 seconds. That's it.

So why is Betaworks suddenly getting into mobile games?

Patrick Moberg, a Betawork hacker-in-residence behind the game, started dabbling with different user interaction designs on iOS about three months ago while working on Tapestry, another Betaworks project that is used for presenting short stories in an engaging way. He didn't intend to create a game, but as he put it to Mashable, as he started playing with design elements, "I sort of forgot the words." He spent a few weeks building a prototype and then let the team at Betaworks test it, some of whom got lost playing the game for "hours."

Even though Moberg didn't initially set out to make a game, he quickly settled on some core principles for what a mobile game should look like: It should be simple enough for anyone to play with little to no instruction; it shouldn't force users to have to pay for in-app purchases to advance in the game and it should be something that "reduces stress" during and after playing it. To that end, the gestures used in the game are very basic (just slide your finger to connect the dots) and while there are in-app purchases to buy "dots" to stop time or shrink a dot off the board, you can attain these same perks eventually just by playing.

"We talked to the people who make those insanely addictive games [for mobile] and we sort of took half their advice and incorporated it and took the other half and dimissed it," Moberg says.

The goal for Betaworks, though, isn't just to make a catchy game, but to use the game to get more insight on user engagement for its other media-focused properties.

"One of the key things that we are learning in this is how to keep people engaged in the product and how to keep the experience enjoyable for them," Paul Murphy, SVP of products at Betaworks, told Mashable. "That's something that we want to apply to Tapestry, to Digg, to any of our products and companies that want to maximize for engagement. Hopefully it will bring a different strength to the Betaworks products."

Betaworks' stated goal is to build a "media company for this century" and it has done so by gradually building up an ecosystem of media products ranging from analytics tools like Bit.ly and Chartbeat to online reading products like Instapaper and Digg. This game may help Betaworks continue to connect the dots in building that media company.

Mashable
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